Trump signs an order to design a US Space Academy at Johnson Space Center

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on 28 August to start work on a United States Space Academy. He did it on stage at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, after handing the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four Artemis II crew members. The order does not open a campus. It creates a Presidential Commission on the United States Space Academy and gives that body 120 days to send him a design.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is chair. The assistant to the president for science and technology and the assistant to the president for economic policy are vice chairs. Deputy Administrator Matt Anderson is executive director. The commission must propose a governance frame, a curriculum, service obligations for graduates, applicant rules, a process for choosing a permanent site, pilot programmes, a legislative plan and an implementation plan.

Trump said the country needs a generation of service members, engineers and civil operators as the Space Force and the commercial sector grow and as missions move to the Moon and past it. "It's called the U.S. Space Academy. That's a big deal," he said. He added that a nation cannot be first on Earth if it is second in space.

Not West Point in orbit

Officials familiar with the project told Ars Technica the academy is not meant to be a classic service school that commissions officers the way West Point or the Air Force Academy does. It would sit under NASA. Tuition would be free. Graduates would owe several years of service. Some slots would feed the Space Force. Most, those officials said, would go to NASA and other civilian posts.

Isaacman had already put an academy into Project Athena, his plan to rebuild the civil space workforce. Friday's order is the legal shell for that idea. NASA's own release said the proposed school would combine technical teaching with leadership training and public service. The White House fact sheet used the same three parts.

Congress still has to write any statute that creates a federal academy, funds it and sets the service contract. The order tells NASA to carry out the commission's approved recommendations after the president signs off and after any needed legislation. That sequence means the 120-day paper is a brief, not a founding charter.

The Houston stage

The same ceremony honoured Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen for Artemis II, the April flight that took a crew around the Moon for the first time since Apollo. Trump said the United States would put astronauts back on the lunar surface before the end of his term and spoke of a permanent American settlement on the Moon, then Mars. He also said NASA had begun work on a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft aimed at a 2028 Mars launch. Those claims sit outside the order and will be tested by budgets and hardware, not by the commission's calendar.

Johnson Space Center is named in NASA's release as the site of the first academy. The order itself asks the commission to propose a process for selecting a permanent location, which leaves Houston as a political starting point rather than a locked address.

The signing follows a December 2025 order on American space superiority and an 20 August National Space Transportation Policy memorandum. Taken together they are an attempt to write workforce, transport and doctrine on the same page. The missing page is money.

What 120 days can settle

The commission can decide whether the school looks like a service academy with a civilian majority, a NASA graduate college with a uniformed stream, or a hybrid that borrows faculty from both. It can also say how many students the first class should hold and what they must study besides orbital mechanics: law, logistics, nuclear systems, planetary geology, command.

Rep. George Whitesides and other members will have to decide whether they want a new Title 10-style academy or a cheaper NASA training centre with a grand name. Until that vote, the Space Academy exists as an order, a chair and a deadline. The Artemis II crew already flew. The next cohort the order describes has no classrooms yet.